Product Description
A macabre but deeply moving story of the music tutor who, in her last years, helped her adult pupil, Gerard, to bond closer to his child despite her secret craving that she might have once enjoyed fulfilment had she given birth to a child of her own. Instead she had achieved success in her career but never fulfilment in her life. Ashamed he cannot relate to his daughter, Rosie, Gerard accompanies and stays with her for violin lessons at the home of tutor, Ruth Stein. Ruth, fascinating him for her musical sensitivity, becomes a confidante. Against his better judgement and his wife's reservations - the paranoid, Gerard, can only cling to believing the tutor can bring him closer to Rosie. Soon, he must wrestle with his suspicions again, for Ruth mothers Rosie, almost smothers...Reaching out to a broken doll, propped in the darkness at the bottom of Ruth's garden well, Gerard wants to believe what he touches and smells is just the decay of sacks enfolding a doll; the closest to a child that the lonely old spinster could cling. Investigating, Gerard's fears for Rosie's safety begin to mount. Rosie draws closer to her father, notices his new concern but, if she is in real danger, can he save her? If he needs to save her, can Gerard triumph over the emotional void of paranoia; feel, accept, he and Rosie could share the love of which others speak? Set in contemporary Malvern, its wells, Winter Gardens and hills. Also, German occupied Prague.
About the Author
Raymond Nickford has been published, apart from his novels, for his searching character studies in stories of psychological suspense as a contributor to USA anthologies including: "Voices of a Hypnotist" published in Gaslight, "Family Tree" in Haunts no.32, "Nanny's Friends" in Not One of Us, "A Musical Calling" in Heliocentric Net. Vol 5. and "The Parchment Recipes" in Chills no.8 British Fantasy Society Magazine. He has taught English in colleges and as a tutor; the years visiting pupils in shacks to mansions, from what he calls "the delightful to the vaguely Little Lord Fauntleroy," in part informed his fourth novel, a psychological suspense thriller - A Child from the Wishing Well, which it is hoped, may also see publication towards the end of 2011 in large print and audio form for libraries which supply fiction to those for whom he has a special sympathy; the visually impaired. Nickford has a degree in Philosophy and Psychology from The University College of North Wales, Bangor, and is working on another psychological suspense "Prey to Her Madonna". His favourite authors range from Hitchcock, through Patricia Highsmith to Ruth Rendell and Henry James.
